Looking at
the image.

ISSUE 1: INTRODUCTIONS

Anima of Animals

BY THAIRONE · SEPTEMBER 2026

The animal in Rilke remains within space. Thairone designates the “Open” as a lived field, a world that has not been cut off from the one who moves through it, or turned into an object by a gaze that returns upon itself. Human perception, by contrast, transforms what it sees into signs, making the animal body into an image within a world organized by our own reflection.

This becomes a question for cinema whenever the camera encounters an animal. Filming an animal can either absorb its body into a human register, making its affects legible through familiar signs, or it can allow something of the animal to appear before language turns it into a problem. Thairone turns to Jean Painlevé and his filming of the sea urchin, where gelatin reveals an internal architecture that the camera can make visible without simply reducing the animal to something already recognized.

From Painlevé, the essay moves toward Marey, Disney, Bresson, Renoir, Hawks, Brakhage, and the animal paintings of Lascaux. Across these examples, the central question remains what cinema can do when confronted with a form of existence that cannot be completely translated into human meaning. The animal becomes, in this sense, one of cinema’s most demanding tests: can the image learn to see what exists before its gaze?